Electronic Bullet to the Hard Drive

I have three computers at home:
1. my regular computer, which I use to surf the web, send out email, play games on
2. my Media Center PC, which is acts like a Tivo and records TV shows
3. my Windows Home Server, which has all of my music, photos and videos

Well, last night, one of the hard drives on my #2 machine, the Media Center PC, died on me, nuking all of the content on it. There wasn't any irreplaceable on it. Just a bunch of recorded TV shows, like American Idol and Battlestar Galactica. The downer is that there were also a bunch of kid TV shows that got lost as well, including Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Little Einsteins and my favorite, er my daughter's personal fav, the Teletubbies. As you can imagine, both of my daughters were not pleased to find out that Tinky Winky and the gang "disappeared". So I'm in search of a new hard drive. If I don't get one soon, I'm tubby-toast.

Getting Your Taxes Done

So, I'm finally done with my taxes. I'm not sure why it took me this long to get them done and sent out. I usually try to get them wrapped up by the end of March so I'm a little bit surprised at myself for waiting this long to send them in.

Our typical approach to taxes goes something like this:

• early January - get Turbotax coupon from Costco in the mail (along with coupons for other important stuff, like frozen chicken wings, kitchen paper towels and LCD TVs)
• mid to late January - go to Costco and buy Turbotax (and frozen chicken wings and kitchen paper towels; alas, no LCD TV this year) and use coupon
• early February - install Turbotax and do a high level pass on taxes to see what the damage is
• early March - start doing taxes in earnest; see what the real damage is
• end of March - find an envelope
• also end of March - find a paper clip
• also end of March - go to the post office and send off tax return
• beginning of April - relief

Turbotax is pretty cool and super convenient. I started my return in early February and pretty much went through all of the sections (although I skipped some of the more detailed stuff like stocks and crap like that).

What was interesting was that when I restarted my tax return in early March, I did the whole "update your software" thing and after Turbotax downloaded and installed the updates, I noticed that something was tacked on towards the end of the return. The question about what to do with your tax rebate (aka the stimulus package) was now in the form, asking you if you want your rebate direct deposited or send via snail mail. It's cool that Intuit included the update feature in Turbotax to update their product when necessary.

In any case, doing taxes isn't so cool but having Turbotax update itself so that it can direct deposit money to you ... well, heck, that's awesome. I probably won't find Turbotax so awesome next year since I probably won't see that question updated in Turbotax Tax Year 2008.

On A Need to Snow Basis

So, it's the end of March and over the past weekend, Seattle got a good dumping of snow. Not a whole lot, mind you, but enough to build a couple of snowpeople in our backyard.

Emily and Ally (my daughters, 4 and 2) wanted to go outside and play in the snow so after bundling them up in several layers of clothes, we headed out to the wild wilderness that is our backyard and made a couple of snowmen ... or, well ... snowpeople. The snowperson on the left is Emily. Ally is the one on the right. The "Creator" is the one in the center. It's crazy weather though. Usually, we get snow in the December/January timeframe so it's surprising to us to see snow sticking to the ground in late March. Not that it was a bad thing since making snowpeople is always a lot of fun. For more pictures, you can check out my Flickr website at http://www.flickr.com/photos/skuramur/.

The Meaning of Wham!

So, some of you probably know this already but I'm a big Lost fan. I think it's the greatest TV show ever conceived and currently the only game in town that consistently keeps me glued to the edge of my seat each week. I usually Tivo (or technically, record it on my Media Center PC) Lost and watch it post-live broadcast. Occasionally, both Tivo and Media Center will, due to the goofy time schedules that ABC plays with popular TV shows, where a TV show will run over the usual one hour time slot by several minutes, probably to intentionally mess up people's Tivo recording schedules, record a portion of the show that plays after Lost, which currently is a new show called Eli Stone. And the pilot episode of Eli Stone had George Michael in it (don't ask me why; go watch the show to find out why GM shows up).

In any case, after having watched that pilot, I've been on this Wham!/George Michael groove where I would play nothing but Wham! and/or George Michael on my iPod/Zune player(s). In fact, I'm currently listening to "Everything She Wants" and thinks that it rocks! Rocks hard! Like Michael Jackson during his Thriller days hard (that's another post).

I was joking to a friend of mine that there is bound to be a Wham! Reunion Tour spinning up sometime soon since 1) all of these other groups from the 80s (The Police, Van Halen) are doing these reunion tours; why not Wham!, 2) I'm sure George Michael is hard up for some public lovin' after all of the negative press during the past few years and 3) that other dude (Andrew Ridges ... or something like that) could use the visibility.

First Entry

So, I'm going to give this blog thing a try and keep going until 1) work/life gets too busy to update this blog or 2) I lose interest in updating the blog or 3) a combination of both. Hopefully, I'll find the time and motivation to keep going for some time.